Remembering Arthur Gelb and his great biographical subject, Eugene O'Neill

Gelb is most famous for helping lead The New York Times. But his biographies of O'Neill, written with his wife, are an immense part of his legacy as well.

Eugene O'Neill
(Image credit: (Bettmann/CORBIS))

It's perfectly understandable that obituaries marking the death of Arthur Gelb would highlight his many influential years at the helm of The New York Times. But the first thing I thought of when I heard news of his passing was that the great biographer of Eugene O'Neill had died.

Playwright Tony Kushner has called O'Neill "our Shakespeare," and I quite agree. Not that the plays of O'Neill, viewed as a whole, can really be said to match or surpass the almost supernatural poetic and dramatic perfection found in Shakespeare's corpus. But O'Neill consistently strove to create a distinctively American form of tragic drama, and at his best — above all in Long Day's Journey Into Night and The Iceman Cometh — he achieved it on a Shakespearean level. No one in our history has come close to outshining him.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.